HARRY N. ABRAMS: POP GOES THE ART BOOK

HARRY N. ABRAMS: POP GOES THE ART BOOK

by Eric Himmel Harry N. Abrams (1905–1979) was forty-four when he founded his eponymous art-book company in 1949. For the previous thirteen years, he had been a jack-of-all-trades and right-hand man to Harry Scherman, chairman of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Among his many responsibilities at the club, Abrams produced membership premiums incorporating fine-art reproductions. Always restless while working for others, Abrams had, in his spare time, created an Illustrated Modern Library for Bennett Cerf at Random House that failed to get traction, a greeting-card business that he quickly unloaded to Hallmark, and an Illustrated Junior Library for Grosset & Dunlap that went on to generate reassuringly large royalties when his own start-up was struggling.1 Born in London and raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where the family lived in the back of his father’s shoe store, Abrams had dropped out of high school to sell shoes. His mother, whose ambitions for her son did not encompass the trade of shoe salesman, observed the pleasure Harry took in drawing and encouraged him to try art school. Stints at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League of New York led not to a career as an artist—he was a realist as far as his talent was concerned—but to a job at Sackheim & Scherman, an advertising agency that serviced book publishing clients, and a lifelong love of art. At the agency, he gravitated toward art direction, doing layouts and typography, for example, for ads for Messrs. Simon and Schuster, and for Scherman, who had left the firm in 1926 to launch his book club.

Art-book publishing gathered the strands of Harry’s experiences and interests into a satisfying pattern, although industry pros gave it little chance of success (Abrams later reported that Cerf bet him $100 that he would be publishing more commercial books within three years2). At the time, the only companies that specialized in art books with color plates were based in Europe, and only one, Skira, which had been founded by Albert Skira in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1928, had plans for distribution in the United States.3 To make such books required expertise and access to suppliers beyond the ken of everyday trade publishers, and, even more important, a faith in the power of images to communicate ideas and feelings that went against the grain of a literary profession. Abrams was unusual in that he had all that, plus a flair—some would say genius—for marketing and selling books.

1 Unless otherwise noted, the biographical details about Harry Abrams in this essay, and all of the direct quotations, are taken from his oral history interview for the Archives of American Art, March 14, 1972 (https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-harry-n-abrams-13015).

2 Lee Lescaze, “Hard-Cover Art Galleries,” Washington Post, November 27, 1978 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1978/11/27/hard-cover-art-galleries/2eac458b-c225-4560-9552-6a3f84f756d6/).

3 Coincidentally, Skira launched its publications in America in fall 1950, the same season as Abrams’ first list.

Two inspired hires in the early years helped to set the course of the company. Editor in chief Milton S. Fox (1904–1971), the company’s first employee, had worked as a journeyman portrait painter and run the public education program at the Cleveland Museum of Art before decamping to Hollywood to write film scripts.4 The sociable Fox knew everyone in the small art world of the 1950s, proved to be a brilliant book maker and editor, and helped raise Harry’s spirits in times of adversity. “It was his great wit and enthusiasm,” wrote Harry, “that pulled us through many of the difficult periods.”5 The company’s international business was managed by Fritz Landshoff (1901–1988), a German-émigré literary publisher of great distinction who, finding himself down on his luck, cold-called Harry in search of a job and was hired in 1952. From his base in Amsterdam, Landshoff enjoyed acquiring art books (and color plates) for New York to publish, but proved his worth by selling foreign-language editions of the many art-book series that Harry created to European publishers, essentially reversing the flow of art books back into the continent and providing Abrams with an essential revenue stream.6 “Without him,” said Harry, “I really believe our business could not have survived.”

Harry raised $100,000 to launch his business, and he put in another $50,000 before he had books to sell in the fall of 1950. The first list comprised three volumes in a series grandly titled Library of Great Painters: Van Gogh, Renoir, and El Greco, each commissioned from a substantial scholar.7 In the spring of that year, Harry and Milton worked around the clock, assisted by future art historian Dore Ashton, straight out of school, to get the books ready for production.8 They adapted a familiar European format: Each volume would have a biographical introduction and fifty tipped-in color plates of paintings, with a commentary facing each work. With cloth bindings and heavy “French-fold” jackets, the books would retail for ten dollars apiece.9 Abrams printed 25,000 copies of each title—his head was still in the land of the Book-of-the-Month-Club—and sold about half; suddenly his liquidity was gone, frozen in warehoused books, and he was a year off from publishing his next two titles. He had a lot to learn.

The emphasis on pictures and words flummoxed reviewers of that first list. Critic Clement Greenberg, in the New York Times Book Review, was surprised by the intellectual effort that went into the books, calling Meyer Schapiro’s Van Gogh “as penetrating an analysis of Van Gogh’s art and development as I have yet seen.”10 Meanwhile Charles Poore, reviewing for the daily paper, gave no evidence that he

4 See “Milton S. Fox, Editor, Is Dead; Official of Art Book Company,” New York Times, October 26, 1971.

5 Harry N. Abrams, “Preface,” Art Studies for an Editor: 25 Essays in Memory of Milton S. Fox (New York: Abrams, 1975), 1.

6 On Landshoff, see Barbara Braun, “From Mann to Monet: Fritz Landshoff’s Six Decades in Publishing,” Publishers Weekly, January 18, 1985, 40–45.

7 The Van Gogh and the Renoir are still in print today. Eventually, there would be thirty-three volumes.

8 Harry N. Abrams, “Preface,” Art Studies for an Editor.

9 At the time, hardcover trade books sold for about three dollars.

10 Clement Greenberg, “Realism and Beyond,” New York Times, December 3, 1950.

had read them at all: The books, he wrote, in their “stiff splendor” with “bright pages . . . make a fine present at any time.”11 Here, right at the beginning, were the seeds of the paradox that gave rise to Harry’s practice of getting the best people to write his books and paying them very little. In this, he would cause much resentment in the small world of art historians, not least because he became rich himself. But “readers” of those early books placed a high value on those costly color plates, and Harry would certainly have been pleased that both reviewers agreed that his were excellent.

As bookstore shelves filled with the handsome white-jacketed volumes of Library of Great Painters, Harry would see his name become synonymous with expensive, well-made books. However, his path to profitability in those early years was through cheaper publications. When he found that he couldn’t sustain his business on ten-dollar hardcover art books, he quickly began to package their color plates in “portfolio” and pocket formats at one-tenth the price, eventually branching out to poster-size prints, producing a tidal wave of imagery for a public not yet jaded by reproductions of art masterpieces. Harry, whose ideal publishing scenario was to “reach out to as large an audience as possible at the lowest price possible,” estimated that by 1958 he had sold fifty million color impressions of works of art via such diverse channels as Book-of-the-Month and other clubs, the Time Life direct-mail list, special sales to Western Electric and General Motors, and even supermarkets.12 The public that was hungry for art imagery was also in need of art instruction. Enter H. W. Janson, a prodigiously talented émigré art historian at New York University. Frustrated by the available textbooks for art survey courses, Janson was intrigued by the potential of a “new and still largely unexplored variety of art publication” for readers “with limited or no prior knowledge.” A significant challenge of such a publication would be “to provide good and plentiful illustrations while keeping the price sufficiently low for mass distribution.”13 After talks with Phaidon in the United Kingdom came to naught, Janson got in touch with Milton Fox. With his wife, Dora Jane, he wrote a series of books for Abrams, starting with The Story of Painting for Young People (1952), an instant hit and the company’s first children’s book, and culminating with their History of Art (1962). This was the textbook, with 848 illustrations, that Janson had imagined more than a decade earlier.

Abrams, reaching the college market via a partnership with Prentice Hall, claimed to have sold a million copies of the first edition of Janson, as the book came to be known, in the next five years.

Indeed, so dominant was Janson in art education that it became a flashpoint for feminist outrage over the author’s exclusion of female artists from the art-historical canon. As college art-history

11 Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, December 21, 1950.

12 Current Biography Yearbook 1958 (New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1958), 5; “Abrams Inc. Explores New Markets for Art Book Publications,” Publishers Weekly, April 17, 1961, 28–30.

13 Quoted in Elizabeth Sears and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, “An Émigré Art Historian and America: H. W. Janson,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 2 (June 2013): 233.

courses above the general survey level swelled with baby boomers, the demand for more specialized textbooks—Italian Renaissance Art, Modern Art—became irresistible. Abrams’ textbook program grew, creating new challenges for Harry: Textbooks generated a consistent return on investment, protecting the company to some extent from the vicissitudes of the trade marketplace, but they were expensive to make.

In the fall of 1962, coinciding with the release of Janson, the Sidney Janis Gallery mounted the firstever pop art exhibition in a vacant storefront across from the Abrams office on West 57th Street.

Harry, stopping in on his way to and from lunch, found it mesmerizing. He already possessed a small art collection that befitted his climb up the social ladder from Brownsville to the Upper East Side, but now he was instantly consumed with an appetite to own contemporary art. This obsession both enriched and complicated his life (“You’re always short of cash because you’re always buying,” he reflected ruefully.) Soon the Abrams office was also an art gallery, and Harry was publishing not only art books but art editions in the form of prints and multiples. Added to the mix were the first pathbreaking monographs on American contemporary art.

Publishing art books and collecting art are both expensive pursuits. In constant need of capital and, according to Landshoff, anxious that, by the terms of his borrowing, he had inadvertently left himself personally liable for the business’s financial obligations, Harry sold his company to the Times Mirror Company of Los Angeles in April 1966; Harry N. Abrams, Inc., retained Harry’s services as chairman and CEO, as well as those of Landshoff and Fox, and when the dust settled, the art collection remained Harry’s personal property.14 Three months later, the Harry N. Abrams Family Collection was put on exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York; included were an astonishing ninety-six paintings created and acquired in the four years since Harry had wandered into Janis’s exhibition, among them many iconic touchstones by modern masters well-known to art lovers today.15 The lessons of pop art, which elevated commercial and everyday objects to cultural icons through adroit presentation and marketing, would shape the next stage of Harry’s book-making career. He was alert to the changing audience for art books. The typical book-club and mail-order customer had been comfortable with the Old Masters; this appetite, while populist, was becoming sated. The more sophisticated urban bookstore browser was coming around to appreciating contemporary art; this taste was elitist and yielded modest book sales.16 While it was said that Times Mirror had purchased Abrams for “prestige,” the company also wanted profits. The prestige now proved to be almost as valuable as cash; the solution, twenty years after Cerf’s wager, was to spend it to broaden Abrams’ program.

14 W alter Carlson, “Advertising: Braniff Joining a New Agency,” New York Times, April 5, 1966. Barbara Braun, “From Mann to Monet,” 44–45.

15 See The Harry N. Abrams Family Collection (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1966).

16 These ideas are expressed in Harry’s oral history interview for the Archives of American Art.

In 1968, Harry huddled with Bernard Danenberg, Norman Rockwell’s dealer, and agreed to publish a book on the artist, who stood quietly to one side. There had been others, but none like Norman Rockwell: Artist and Illustrator (1970), which had the pop of a Warhol painting: It measured one-byone-and-a-half feet, with poster-size, double-page reproductions and a legitimating text by Thomas Buechner, the director of the Brooklyn Museum. “This is not a coffee-table book; it is the table itself,” wrote a reviewer.17 It was said that a fan put legs on a copy and gave it to Harry. A year later, two hundred thousand had been sold. The World of M.C. Escher arrived in 1971; The Art of Walt Disney (1973) was the next blockbuster title after Rockwell’s. Rockwell, Escher, and Disney provided a sound foundation for a profitable publishing program in the visual arts, even though none of them would have belonged in the art world as many in Harry’s generation understood it (even Rockwell cringed when Harry put the word “artist” in the title of his book). In his embrace of a broad visual culture outside of high art, Harry was ahead of the curve.

By all accounts, Harry’s last years at Abrams were rocky. Fox had died in 1971; Harry was out of sync with the editors brought in to fill those shoes and evasive about planning for succession (“I’m here, I’ll be around”).18 He departed in 1976 (“They did what they had to do and I did what I had to do”).19 In his last decade at the firm, he had instilled in his executives a “big book” mentality and enlarged their horizons: One Times Mirror transplant from Los Angeles marveled at the “typesetting from Korea or Hong Kong, separations from Switzerland, printing from Japan, and binding from somewhere else. I will miss reading my twenty pages of Telexes every morning from all over the world.”20 None of them, however, was much enthused about publishing traditional art books.

In 1959, Harry had created Abradale, a special imprint for books on non-art subjects, like a home medical encyclopedia written by an old friend and family bibles, fodder for book clubs. By the late 1960s, “illustrated books” (a serviceable term for art books that weren’t about art) began to appear in the Abrams lists; in 1971, the expression “gift book” cropped up in the company’s advertising for the first time.21 With traditional art books a glut on the market, the success of the Rockwell and Disney titles launched a frenzied search for more diverse properties that could support a company with Abrams’ overhead. Some, like Jacques Cousteau and the Muppets, arrived via TV. Andrew Stewart (b. 1938), who had been an attorney at Times Mirror and became Harry’s replacement as CEO, had parachuted into the company in 1975 and acquired Gnomes (1977) from a Dutch publisher; it sold

17 Q uoted in Deborah Solomon, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1913), 420, from which this description of the encounter and publication is taken.

18 Barbara Braun, “From Mann to Monet,” 45.

19 Lescaze, “Hard-Cover Art Galleries.” In 1977, Harry founded Abbeville Press with his son Robert E. Abrams.

20 “Digby Diehl, Leaving Abrams, Reflects on the Lot of a Publisher,” Publishers Weekly, November 26, 1979, 13.

21 Linda E. Connors, Sara Lynn Henry, and Jonathan W. Reader, “From Art to Corporation: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., and the Cultural Effects of Merger,” The Structure of International Publishing in the 1990s (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992), 54.

more than a million copies and held a spot on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for fiftysix weeks. Publishers Weekly captured the company’s changing profile adroitly in a 1978 headline: “Abrams, Well-Gnome for Its Art Books.”22 Stewart’s successor, Paul Gottlieb (1935–2002), who would run the company through the end of 2000 in a commanding manner with an impresario’s panache similar to Harry’s, arrived in 1980.23 Gottlieb had been president and publisher at American Heritage, where he had mastered illustrated-book publishing. His standing in the New York cultural establishment was impeccable: William S. Paley had, in 1975, made him that rare trustee of the Museum of Modern Art recruited for his expertise rather than his wealth. In a burst of energy, Gottlieb doubled the size of the company in the expansive 1980s, reconnecting it to the art world, especially via his museum associations, without neglecting its now-diverse portfolio.

Large changes washed over the company in the five years around the turn of the century. In 1997, Times Mirror sold Abrams to La Martinière Groupe in Paris, and in a coda to that sale, Prentice Hall acquired Abrams’ textbook division in 2002.24 Most significant for the company’s long-term survival and growth, however, was the launch of a children’s book division, Abrams Books for Young Readers, in 1999. It was fortuitous that Michael Jacobs (b. 1951), who joined Abrams as president and CEO in 2004, had most recently been senior vice president of the trade group at Scholastic, where he was instrumental in the sales and marketing of the Harry Potter series.

The third in a series of long-tenured, forceful Abrams leaders, Jacobs instilled a new level of publishing professionalism over the next fifteen years, more than doubling the size of the company and diversifying both the adult and children’s programs across a broad spectrum of categories and formats. These efforts bore fruit when Abrams, a specialized company only recently emerged from its modest niche, proved able to grow Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a middle-grade children’s book series launched in 2007, into one of the era’s largest publishing phenomena, with more than two hundred million copies in print in sixty-four languages and seventy-six editions at the time of writing.

In his lifetime, Harry N. Abrams could justly claim to have spurred interest in art throughout postwar American society and pioneered the art-book-as-cultural-object. The young person who grew up with Abrams’ $1.50 portfolios on Michelangelo and the Louvre in the family den in the 1950s and learned about art in college from Abrams’ Janson in the 1960s would happily spend $45.00 to buy

22 “Abrams, Well-Gnome for Its Art Books, Launches a New Sidelines Division,” Publishers Weekly, March 13, 1978, 92.

23 Gottlieb’s arrival in 1980 as editor in chief precipitated the abrupt departure of Stewart with two Abrams colleagues, marketing and special sales director Lena Tabori and art director Nai Chang, to found Stewart, Tabori & Chang. In 2000, Abrams acquired Stewart, Tabori & Chang out of bankruptcy.

24 At the time of the sale, La Martinière Groupe was named Groupe Latingy. La Martinière Groupe was sold in 2017 to Média-Participations, which owns Abrams at the time of writing.

Abrams’ Rockwell for his or her own family in the 1970s. As a colleague, Harry was often portrayed as a dictatorial one-man band,25 but he nonetheless ensured his posterity by creating a business with the capacity to expand and evolve over time, affording expanding niches to talented people (a surprising number of them would go on to found or become leaders in other illustrated-book companies).

Perhaps because its owners were always either a continent or an ocean away, the company—with its deep wells of illustrated-book publishing expertise and a do-it-yourself approach to new initiatives— has retained and grown his independent spirit.

25 See, for example, Barbara Burn’s comments in Barbara Braun, “Art Books: A World of Change,” Publishers Weekly, August 19, 1983, 28.